Sometimes I feel the wokerati – the virtue signallers – with their holier-than-thou attitudes, would prefer those of us who grew up in the 1970s and before simply to drop dead.
Everything we say or think or come out with is so obviously tainted by the attitudes and sensibilities of a time which is past, a time which is meant to fill everyone with shame.
There’s no point arguing. You can’t win. It’s like when Stalin told his KGB torturers: ‘We alone will determine what is truth and what is not.’
But I am still flummoxed by the news about the BBC TV sitcom Terry And June, which first hit our screens in 1979, starring Terry Scott and June Whitfield as a middle-class, middle-aged couple living in the suburbs.
On its website, the streaming service Britbox, which allows us to view the show, has decided to warn subscribers that it ‘contains discriminatory language of the period’.
What in the name of Satan have poor old Terry and June done to deserve this? It must be the maddest trigger warning yet issued.
For if ever there were a more anodyne, sweet-natured, easy-going or non-confrontational sitcom, I can’t think of one. It was a reworking of Happy Ever After, also starring Scott and Whitfield as a cosy middle-class couple, and between them the two shows notched up 106 episodes from 1974 to 1987 and were watched regularly by 10million viewers.
Terry And June used to be controversial because it wasn’t controversial: The alternative comedians of the 1980s and 90s mocked its suburban inanities. But suburban inanity is what real people wanted. Set in Purley, south-east London, and with location scenes shot in Croydon, Terry and June were the archetypal English couple looking to better themselves and avoid the pratfalls of marital life.
Terry was a sales manager for Playsafe Fire Extinguishers & Appliances. June was the put-upon wife, in control – ultimately – of her husband’s whims and caprices, steering him away from too much disaster. Above all, it was comforting, particularly the predictability of the plots – traffic problems, wallpapering problems, house-moving problems.
There’d be whole half-hours devoted to buying a carpet, dealing with a car alarm, searching for lost pets, or coping with a broken lawnmower.
There were golf-course antics, cooking dinner for the boss antics. When the big man comes round to their home in Elmtree Avenue and suggests a game of bridge, Terry, who knows nothing about the card game, bangs his head on the table and pretends he has amnesia, which is why he suddenly can’t recall the rules.
In the interests of research, I’ve been rewatching Terry And June, determined to flush out what might conceivably in this day and age be thought offensive. Can it be Terry’s fondness for imitating the voice of Tarzan – is that upsetting to Africans?
Or is it a scene where Terry and June are hosting a barbecue in which his colleague Malcolm misreads the invitation and turns up dressed as a Native American.
No. I think the problem is that here we had a white middle-aged man married to a white middle-aged woman, with an off-screen grown-up daughter called Wendy. The blatant heterosexual normality is what gets the woke goat, now we are not meant to differentiate between males, females, and various pronouns.
Of course, many sitcoms I used to love are beyond the pale too. In Fawlty Towers Basil ranting about Germans was considered offensive to Germans and the Major was not allowed to reminisce about his Army days in India.
Everyone has become more prim than a Victorian curate. In On The Buses, we can’t warm to Reg Varney’s jack-the-lad driver nor Bob Grant’s womanising conductor.
But Terry and June? A modern update, to tick the correct boxes, would probably be called Terry And Terry, or June And June, and involve disabled asylum seekers on benefits living in a tower block, whilst awaiting an appointment at a gender dysphoria clinic. Although that would shake up life in 1970s Purley, wouldn’t it?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/articles.rss
Roger Lewis
